Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday February 26, 2014 @11:03PM
from the look-at-the-bones dept.

sciencehabit writes "In 2010, workers widening a remote stretch of highway near the northwestern coast of Chile uncovered a trove of fossils, including the skeletons of at least 30 large baleen whales. The fossils—which may be up to 9 million years old—are the first definitive examples of ancient mass strandings of whales, according to a new study. The work also fingers a possible culprit."

"The work also fingers a possible culprit"
Anthropomorphic Global Warming?
(not a troll, just a funny, vote me down if you will)

Don't be stupid. It was obviously caused by US Navy sonar. Yes, our sonar is THAT powerful.

Actually, that highway is a toll road and they didn't have exact change. If you ever saw a 20 meter tractor trailer try to make a U-turn, just imaging what it must have been like trying to get 30, 30 meter whales to turn around. It's no wonder they didn't make it.

Actually, that far back, you're pre-dating all of the likely common ancestors of the anthropoid apes, with the possible exception of the common ancestor of the Pongoidae and the rest of the anthropoid apes.

No, the US Navy of course. This discovery pushes the first use of sonar back several million years.

Not to mention the invention of the United States.

Didn't you know that the United States has existed since the dawn of time, ruled by white people? Modern revisionists want to claim that them thar injuns is "native Americans", but we all know the truth....

Incidentally, the whales were presumably stranded when the Great Flood subsided. The Mountains of Ararat must therefore be in the Americas. That's how white men got there, see?

Hmm... on the one hand, we do get various posts here from people remaining anonymous because they work for the company in question, but on the other hand we also get rashes of anonymous racism and other abuse. The anonymous beta-bashing is pretty pointless, though: the one group who do know who you are is Slashdot....

Agreed. This cannot be true. Before humans came and fucked up the world nothing bad ever happened in nature, everything was in perfect alignment and all species thrived and there were no extreme weather cycles. The only way this could be true is if time travel to the past eventually got discovered in the future and we went back with all our evil human things and did this.

I think they should get out some metal detectors and start searching for DeLoreans.

'Oceanic algal bloom' is a credible proposition (though there wasn't any of the palynological or micropalaeontological evidence that one could reasonably have hoped for, and there is evidence of fairly active current movement, which doesn't really help an algal bloom hypothesis). But volcanic gas clouds (e.g. a sulphide-rich ignimbrite projecting out into the bay) is also credible.

At this time, the cause of death isn't clear, and there are multiple credible possibilities.

And Chileans do know at least a bit of chilli (unlike their Argentinian neighbours). But barely enough. Their food is thankfully quite tasty by itself. But, as a Mexican, being in Chile and not being able to find any real chilli... Was quite odd.

The article says: "Second, most of the baleen whale skeletons had been preserved “belly-up”—a position that suggests the creatures died at sea, rolled upside down as they decomposed, and then remained inverted when high tides or storm surges deposited them on shore. That ultimate resting position is typical of modern baleen whales that die at sea, Goldbogen says.

Finally, ripples preserved in the rocks indicate that the carcasses ended up lying crosswise to currents that had cast them onto the beach—just as in modern mass strandings, Pyenson says."

We've been told that modern 'strandings' are the cause of death (witness all the efforts to return the creatures to deeper waters), not the result.

If you RTFP [royalsocie...ishing.org] (it is Open Access ; use it, or lose it!) you'll find that the original researchers don't take that paradigm. They're not at all clear about why the whales died, and think that many of the died and hit the seabed in depths of tens to a hundred or so metres (various lines of evidence : sediment patterns, levels of seabed life ; nearby unambiguous shoreline deposits ; constraints on the angle of slope of the seabed for sediment stability). Though parts of the sequence of beds in which the whales were found were definitely emergent (above sea level) at times, that's not considered the case for the particular beds (plural ! They represent thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years of repeated events.) in which the whale fossils have been found.

TFP isn't confused. The coverage by a journalist working for Science Magazine may be. (I RTFP a few days ago, and promoted it to several geological discussion lists.)

If the alignment of dead, washed-up whale carcasses is the same as that of living, washed-up whale bodies, it at the very least suggests that mass strandings are unintentional, and that the sea has overwhelmed the animals rather than them running themselves aground to escape predators, which was one the theory.